Michael Lombardi retained an attorney this week, and the attorney’s entire visible function so far has been to formally request something Lombardi should already have as an employee: an answer. Tom Mars, the college-sports lawyer who represented Jim Harbaugh through Michigan’s sign-stealing case, released a statement Friday saying his client “hasn’t been told anything about the nature” of the university’s investigation into him.
UNC placed Lombardi on paid administrative leave in late July after a former front-office staffer filed an HR complaint, then followed that by gagging its own program from discussing Lombardi’s leave entirely. That silence held through exactly one media availability before Mars had to step in and make it official on paper.
Retaining outside counsel to ask your own employer a question is usually a sign the employer stopped answering directly a while ago. Mars’s statement isn’t a defense; it doesn’t argue Lombardi’s innocence, because nobody’s told him what he’d be arguing against. Lombardi says he’s “fully cooperating,” expects the review to be “swift, thorough, and fair,” and is asking the public not to convict him before UNC has told him what he’s accused of — meaning the university’s own GM is currently as uninformed as everyone reading about him on their phone.
The public reached its verdict anyway. A day before Mars’s statement, WRAL’s Ross Martin said he couldn’t recall a figure in college sports as broadly disliked as Lombardi, adding he’s “probably not the best option as the front facing person for your football program.”
https://twitter.com/RossMartinNC/status/2082852265497428291
Martin isn’t wrong that Lombardi built that reputation himself since arriving in Chapel Hill. What’s worth noticing is how easily the reputation fills a vacuum the North Carolina Tar Heels created on purpose; nobody needs facts about the investigation to convict Lombardi in public when the university hasn’t offered any.
Then came fall camp on July 31, and Bill Belichick, who has never used ten words when four would do, got asked directly about Lombardi’s absence. He didn’t decline to answer. He answered with the verbal equivalent of a shrug: “We’re working through some things. We’re at a particular time of the year now where there are certain things that are in play, and certain things that are in play that will happen later in the calendar year. So we’re taking it day to day and work through the things that are on the table right now.”
Three sentences, zero information, from a coach whose entire six-championship résumé rests on the idea that he controls information better than anyone else in the building. He had all of camp to prepare that answer and arrived with nothing, which is itself informative: UNC has decided its GM, its head coach, and the watching public all get told the same amount. None.
It’s Belichick’s second information problem of the offseason; Belichick’s other information-control problem this offseason turned his own girlfriend’s public-records fight into a monthslong story he also declined to touch. A program that can’t manage disclosure about a coach’s personal life and can’t manage disclosure about its GM’s HR complaint at the same time is choosing that outcome.
UNC hasn’t even named an acting GM to cover Lombardi’s duties, leaning instead on what’s been described as an all-hands-on-deck approach. Chancellor Lee Roberts called the matter a “personnel matter” the school “learned of some concerns last week” and offered nothing beyond that. Athletics departments love invoking institutional control whenever a program is accused of not knowing what its own people are doing. This is the version that can’t extend to telling its own general manager what he’s being investigated for.
I’ve read Mars’s statement a few times now looking for the sentence where he argues Lombardi did nothing wrong, and it isn’t there, because that isn’t what this statement is for.
None of this means Lombardi is owed the benefit of the doubt on the merits. A GM who spent his first season becoming the most disliked man in his own building forfeits some presumption of good faith, and if the complaint holds up, UNC will have been right to investigate him. But that’s a separate question from the one this piece is about: whether his employer will tell him what it thinks he did, a question UNC is failing on purpose, right up until an outside lawyer had to ask.
Lombardi hired an attorney to ask a question a university employee shouldn’t need one to ask, and North Carolina let him get all the way to hiring one before it considered just answering. Whatever the complaint actually says can wait for the report. What can’t wait is admitting UNC chose this silence, the same way it’s choosing the next one.
